Excerpt from the article written by Kevan Lee and posted on Buffer Blog:"Finding and sharing exquisite content has never had more value than it does today.

What is content curation? Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.Or another definition:"In a world of nearly infinite content, consumers are looking to one-stop shop." by Mike Kaput

Curation is not aggregation.Aggregation is algorithmic. Curation is handpicked.The human element of curation is a huge source of its value.

Significant benefits to a good content curation strategy include:- You improve your relationship with the sites whose content you share.- You grow your authority on a subject (provided the curation is top-notch).- You add quality content to your site or timeline and create a great resource for others.- You save time from creating content yourself, from scratch.

Examples of where you might use content curation:- Curate content in a weekly blog post.- Curate content in an email newsletter.- Curate content on your social media profiles.

How to curate content as efficiently and expertly as possible.Certainly, there is a time investment involved in doing it right (as with most things done well). There are a number of resources, tools, and tricks that help make the curation process even easier. Here’s what’s involved.

-Find unique places to discover exquisite contentWe collected 17 off-the-radar places to search for new content. The off-the-radar spots are often quite good; there’s content on those sites that your audience may not have seen before, which adds an immediate boost of credibility for you and a boost of value your readers.

- Read what you findI can admit to being tempted to skim a story and share it—or skip the skimming altogether and jump straight to sharing! There’s just so much content to read and so little time.I’m clearly not alone in this temptation. Do people read what they share? Not exactly.

- Pick out your favoritesAs you read, make note of the stories that really stood out to you and that you’d like to share. There are a number of different ways of organizing these, ranging from old-school to highly automated.

Batch and schedule: The shortcut to social curationIf you choose to share your curation on social media (great idea!), you have a number of tools at your disposal and one neat time-saving trick: Batch and schedule.

Inside the Buffer curation processCuration is a regular part of our daily activities here at Buffer, both in our social media marketing and in the Buffer product itself. We share the best stories we can find from our archives and from the web to our profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, and we curate a list of content suggestions that are offered fresh each day for folks to pick up and add to their buffers..."

The Internet is brimming with newish content curation tools -- search tools that make finding "buried treasure" content easier, more fruitful, and less time-consuming. These exciting search tools are useful for other purposes, too.

Robin Good curated this resource and it is exactly the curation tool I've been dreaming of - a visual way to curate content for learning.

Here's what Robin wrote about this:

Heiko Idensen reports in his curated newsradar "Online Curating & Social Learning Tools and Applications": "Learnist is a new pinboard where users can organize their learning materials. It resembles Pinterest except that Learnist is just for sharing learning resources.

The website is still in beta but looks really very promising for both teachers and students.

Here is a set of the main features that Learnist offers to its users :

It is free Itis easy to use It has a user friendly interface It lets users create pinboards around a certain topic Users can create different boards and invite others to collaborate on them It lets you pin images,videos, and text to your boards with a single click from Learnist bookmarklet Users can also upload resources to their boards using URLs

Robin Good: Surfmark is a new content curation service introducing some innovative and forward-looking features.

Surfmark in fact provides not only standard capabilities to easily capture, collect and organize content from any web page, but it adds intelligently alternative display formats to allow the exploration of such collections in multiple ways.

Another key innovative feature of Surfmark is its ability to generate bibliographies and summaries of content collections.

Surfmark allows social collaborative curation, history of all edits made, and the ability to share publicly or keep a collection private.

Collections can be downloaded in PDF or text formats and all pages saved in a collection are fully preserved with all the formatting and links intact so that you can refer back to exactly what you saw.

Giuseppe Mauriello: Private beta Storination is content curation tool that provides the first community-oriented platform based on the Storify publishing tool allowing journalists or any user to collate a group of Storify stories around a topic and allows others to add to the storyboard.

Yesterday I received an invitation code as beta tester. I attached a screenshot about my dashboard: I am testing and editing it with my tweets and some sources from this my topic on Scoop.it.

From official website:

"Storination lets you create online communities called a Nation. It's a space where you and other people add into a storyboard social stories. Customize your Nation like a blog by uploading a logo, and a large cover. Now, you can publish a Storify story by collecting photos, video, tweets, embedding URL... or If you prefer, just import social stories directly from Storify to your Nation.

A storyboard is an online set of Storify stories curated by you. After opening your Nation, Storination allows you to compile into a storyboard your stories and other people's stories created in Storify. It's very easy to organize your storyboard by adding or removing stories. With the 'favorite story' feature you highlight stories easily..."

We already wrote about the pointless copyright freakout that some are having about Pinterest -- and since then, not a day has gone by without someone pointing us to yet another hysterical article by someone about how Pinterest is some copyright...

If you are looking for a content curation tool that allows you to collect, save and archive, index and organize your favorite web pages in a visual fashion, Stache may have just what you are looking for.

Key features include:

Permanent archive of screenshot and web page

Full indexing of all pages archived

Full text search across the archive

Tagging

Archive collections are accessible both from Mac and from iPhone / iPad

Import/Export of bookmark collections

URL sharing

Export full archives and individual images

Bookmarklet and browser extension

iCloud sync

Sys req: Mac OS X 10.9 Maverick

Excellent tool for creating searchable visual archives of web pages. Works only on Mac/iOS with latest OS.

A few weeks ago I read an interesting article by Barry Feldman about whether content curation is news or noise. He made some good points. As he notes, “In the end, the acid test is to ascertain whether or not people like what you’re doing.”

The one thing common to every human on the earth is this - TIME. No matter how rich, powerful, beautiful, or intelligent every single human has the same 24 hours in a day- no more, no less.

Content curation can be a blessing to time-challenged people, who have many eyes sifting for content relevant to their own as well as their fellow professionals - so curation can benefit many by, in effect, giving us all "more time" to see those salient and important topics that help us grow.

"Spundge is the end-to-end tool for today's power curator. Connect with the best content creators on the web. Collaboratively curate the web and create relevant, influential content.

- Discover and Filter:

Create a Spundge Notebook to stay on top of a topic, person, company or interest. Spundge Notebooks deliver a stream of relevant content from news sources, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr. Filter and then save the best of what you discover.

- Curate and Collaborate:

Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on Notebooks and discover and save new items. Collaborators receive notifications when new content is saved, and can add comments to Notebook items. Collaborative Curation enables you to track information, while instantly sharing with friends and colleagues.

- Stream and Publish:

Transform your Notebook into a real-time stream you can embed anywhere on the web. Share what you’re reading, or curate a real-time newswire about a breaking event or topic of interest.

- Get Spundge PRO:

it enables teams and individuals to collaboratively create content and instantly publish to a CMS, email newsletter and social accounts. Writing in Spundge lets you drag and drop images, tweets and videos into any story, effortlessly add attribution, and easily embed and track content."

From review article on Nieman Journalism Lab:

"The problem is today’s journalist has to use too many products and applications to do their job, and very few of these were actually built with newsrooms or journalistic workflow in mind...

Spundge is a platform that’s built to take a journalist from information discovery and tracking all the way to publishing, regardless of whatever internal systems they have to contend with...

The software is free, but an optional $9 monthly fee adds premium features, including the ability to share notebooks with collaborators, who can also add to the notebook and see changes in real time..."

Robin Good: NewzSocial is a free iPad curation app which allows you to instantly create topic-specific channels and to easily curate the content stories that you deem appropriate for each.

Curators can work in teams and collaboratively organize one or more news channels.

From the App Store download page: "NewzSocial is a free social news reader app that allows you to follow, create and share broad and niche news streams on your topics of interest.

The app has unique social curation features using which you can tap into your network of ‘topic expert’ friends and get the news you want selected by the experts you know."

A reviewer on the App Store left this comment: "What blew me away is the number of great articles the app has. I just searched for latest fashion trends & got really great articles. With flipboard, after reading 5-7 articles, it's the same stories from yesterday. "

But nonprofits and others always appreciate the comprehensive, well curated and classified list. This is it!

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Robin Good: Everytime I see a new post or article claiming to list the best content curation tools I know I am in for some disappointment.

Most of these lists just pick up names from other lists without even bothering to check, test or verify what these tools actually do, whether they are still available. Unfortunately the rush to put out "curated" list of tools and services has created more misinformation than useful lists.

But if you, like me, are on the lookout for new and effective tools to curate your own content or the one of your customers, I have created a comprehensive map of all the curation tools available online and I keep it fresh and updated almost on a daily basis.

The map presently lists over 250 content curation tools which you can navigate much more easily than it was possible on my earlier versions of this map.

On the right side of the map you will find all of the news and content curation tools available online today. On the left side, you can find bookmarking, link lists builders, clippers and lots of tools to operate with RSS feeds (which are still at the heart of a curator's job).

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Pinterest and Instagram are two of the hottest social media services running today, so imagine my head explosion when I came across Pingram, a site that mashes aspects of the two services together in one interface.

Robin Good: Scribit is more of a content marketing platform than a content curation tool, making it very easy to find and republish full-form licensed content from prestigious sources on your web site and favorite social media channels.

Scribit excels in its ability to provide instantly quality content by tapping into content sources that it has partnered with, and in making it a one-click operation the sharing and re-posting of these onto your favotite social media channels (for now these are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN).

Since Scribit actually provides with a full license to republish not just excerpts but full content articles from its partner sources, the pricing runs from a minimum of $50/month for a site with up to 500 monthly visitors to the $500 of one that gets 8,000 visitors or more.

From the official press release: "Scribit is a web-based content curation service that enables businesses and brands to collect, publish and intelligently share quality and relevant content from across the Web without leaving the company’s digital properties. Scribit maintains publishing relationships within the industry including Business Insider, Discovery, Forbes, Inc., and TVGuide.com"

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.